Infinity
by risokura
Summary: Do not anxiously hope for that which is not yet come; do not vainly regret what is already past. Implied FangLightning


**Disclaimer: **I don't own FFXIII

**A/N: **Loose continuation of Zero. Also told from Fang's perspective.

**-x-**

**Infinity**

**-x-**

**(**_The obscure we see eventually, the completely obvious, it seems, takes longer_**)**

I was on my back, looking up at a night sky that I hadn't seen in over five centuries. A sky rivaling that of onyx littered with a million specks of dazzling light. Cocoon floated off in the distance, eerie and orange—holding secrets that I'd only just come to know.

I used to pace these soils with familiarity. The edges of my home are now barren, laden with crystal dust. They breathe the past that I struggled to remember. I can no longer feel the warmth of the earth beneath my feet as we walk the beaten and trodden path. My soul ascends from my body. Jolted, misplaced, unneeded and unwanted. The place I've come back to is no longer the place that I left so many centuries ago. Death is rampant no matter where I turn. Abysmal lands that only live on in my fragmented memories.

The others were below in the orphanage. I'd stolen away from the rest of them, told them I was going to look around to check on things. The old man had tried to reassure me that things were fine with Snow and Vanille chiming in not too far behind him. Hope found a voice within the chorus. She—of course—was watching me out of the corner of her eye as I left.

I hadn't the heart to voice my contemplations to Vanille about the possible state of our home. The truth of the matter was, I could only surmise what damage had been done to its beauty during our five hundred year absence. In all honesty, when I saw the rest of the shape that Gran Pulse was in, I didn't have high hopes for the state of Oerba before we arrived, but it would pain me to wipe that hopeful look off her face. I knew, the home from my memories, would barely stand stalwart against the test of time given the state the rest of Gran Pulse was in.

I always found complacency in high places. Ever since I was a child, I spent most of the day climbing fixtures, such as this, seeing how far away or high I could get before someone came looking for me. I can tell you that a lecture from matron was never too far behind.

There was something calming and satisfying about the ability to see what lied beyond your peripheral vision on the ground. Sort of like a God viewing the world they created from on top some high mountain or somethin' of that nature.

I eased myself up onto my elbows, distributing my weight slowly and taking care to not move any of the wood planks beneath me. The old boards above the orphanage weren't all too steady so I proceeded with caution upon coming up here. Of course, later on, _she _had no trouble working her way around loose boards and the gaping holes that littered its structure.

We'd thoroughly cleared the area out earlier in the day, leaving Lighting to give the order that we should rest up before taking on whatever challenges awaited us. No one appeared to find the need to object. We all needed the brief reprieve. Of course, she was too stubborn to admit that she was just as tired as the rest of the lot. She was always seeking to perpetuate her gift of endurance over the rest of us. Always trying to stand tall as the perfect soldier despite how beaten down she'd become in such a short time.

The angel born of the viper's nest; devoured whole by the devils from below. We had come a long way since our meeting back in Palumpolum. Since we arrived in Gran Pulse, she seemed to have calmed down significantly. And yet there still remained parts of her that would never seem to change. But none of them really worth mentioning here.

What _does _have some worth, though, is how she threw me completely in the opposite of direction of what I had come to expect from her.

You ever have a moment where someone asks you something, but it doesn't register in your consciousness until a few minutes after they ask you? It was like I heard what she was saying, but my mind wasn't processing a bit of it. But, when it did, I turned to look at her to see if I could read anything in her posture that might help with my response. The two of us had had many conversations like this since coming to Gran Pulse, but this …

This was different.

I craned my neck up further so I could try and meet her eyes. She was beautiful even in her quiescence, seemingly lost within her thoughts. Although her gaze was fixated on Cocoon, her eyes—bright and calculating—moved about rapidly, never seeming to rest on spot for too long. I think maybe she was searching for something.

Her left leg was extended, while the other was drawn up so her chest pressed into the muscle of her right thigh. Her right arm was balanced across her right knee, her fingers steadily clenching and unfurling into a semi-fist. Although I couldn't see her left arm I could make out the fingers of her left hand splayed against her left thigh. It was slight, but I could see her hand fidgeting, shaking with the slightest unease.

Sometimes the mask failed no matter how hard she tried to keep it in place.

I repeated the question to her, so that she looked at me. Her lips drew into a tight line and her eyes were downcast. I folded my arms over my chest, exhaling loudly as I racked my mind for an answer.

_Do you know what love is_?

Love was—love is—sacrifice.

It's the feeling of never being able to let go no matter how hard you want to try.

And yet, it would be foolish to say that we're all taught the same standard definition of love from whence we are birthed. Not all of us come into this world with a loving, tender hand to push us along as we age, and grow. A particular someone to scold us and watch over us with fervor, making sure we right the wrongs of our developing psyche—preparation for our inevitable assimilation into society. A great deal of us will have our innocence torn asunder, and we adapt—learn to survive, live within a world that reflects not the idealities of our consciousness, and perhaps even deeper, our hearts.

Perhaps those who walk this road haven't a need for a thing such as love. Or their definition of something—this love—they equate it with something else. Love comes in the form of the strength they garner to protect themselves and those locked within the burning fire of their core.

By chance, fate seeks out another for you. You meet, your paths converge, and you're brought together by a fortuitous set of circumstances. Perhaps the heavens smile down upon its makings, possessing knowledge of your destiny that you've yet to discover. The eventuality of your essence joining with another brings …perhaps apprehension to your heart and mind, willing you to look outside yourself for something more. To endure something else.

Perhaps you'll recite the annotations made by history. Interpretations of fabled tales of lovers, undaunted in their adulations of adoration. For myself. This human emotion of love has taken many forms.

In the time of the War of Transgression, the only conceivable thought on my mind was to take down and destroy Cocoon. Was love becoming the beast of destruction, against the wishes of all others? I can remember the rapture in my blood, the heat pooling my chest, strengthening my body into unbridled rage and unbarred power. Rage … power … we don't equate those with _love_, do we?

Or was it the love I held for Oerba? My resolve to protect Vanille? To shield her from the cruel hand of war? To keep her resting behind me in my shadow rather than by my side? Keep her blind from the atrocities that awaited us, keep her oblivious from the true nature of our Focus. But, she told me, she wanted to do this. She wanted to join me and share the burden—the pain—of this Focus together. And now, some five hundred years later, here we are with four new companions, trying to retrace the steps of a once failed Focus now reborn.

For me, this love, comes in many forms.

I don't know what exactly she was looking for. Her world and that of my own were light years apart. The definition by which her people defined love and that of my own differed so greatly, I wonder if she could fathom any of what I had just told her.

She recanted the tale of her sister. How she cared for the two of them from what her people considered, _young_. In Oerba, she would have been the proper age for marriage and in short time, childbirth. She told me of how she was orphaned, much like Vanille and myself, and how she did everything in her power to keep her sister safe and give her what she needed while growing up.

Perhaps, I thought, our tales were not as different as I had thought.

She sacrificed whatever of herself so that her sister would be able to flourish. I sacrificed myself to spare the death of any more of my people. But ultimately, the both of us had failed in the end, had we not? I fell into crystal stasis for five hundred years, oblivious to what had occurred in the world outside and she lost her sister to the whims of the fal'Cie.

How cruel this hand of fate. But, that's the chance we gamble with. Lady Luck has her own tricks up her sleeve regardless of what you want.

Somewhere in our correspondence, she had taken to lying down beside me and staring up at the onyx sky above. She commented on how much darker it was on Oerba than on Cocoon. There were too many artificial light sources for my liking on Cocoon. I wanted my wilderness and I had it here on Pulse.

Eventually, she shifted her posture and spread out amongst the boards like I was. We were nearly pressed thigh to thigh and her fingers brushed the tips of my own. The physical contact seemed to alarm her because she flinched briefly before relaxing again and our fingers touched lightly. She always was spotty when it came to touching others, I never understood it.

She began asking me more questions after sometime. How was I so lax in the face of danger? Why wasn't I as worried as the others? Did I think we were going to make it before time ran out? What more could we do to make things all right in the end? Why us? Why now? I answered what I could, giving her lengthy explanations with drawn out details like she preferred. But, even when I thought I'd explained something right to the end, there she was challenging me with even more questions.

I reminded her of her sister when it got to be too much. That seemed, as always, to instantly do the trick. Her eyes glassed over and she seemed to be at a loss for words. Back in Palumpolum, I had told her before that she had a reason to live. It was to see her sister again. Everything that she was doing now, everything that she was fighting against was to have that one moment again where Serah was going to come back.

It didn't matter that she didn't want to destroy Cocoon in the process. It didn't matter that she was fighting her Focus. None of the little nuances and intricacies of this whole damn mess mattered. She wanted to see her sister because she loved Serah. She was the only family she had left and over anything else, that was the only thing that should have mattered in the end.

When it was my turn to get curious, I asked her about her previous question. What of love? What about it?

There was hesitance in her body so I resolved not to press to far, but she told me that she was just curious as to see what I thought about it. She wanted to know if the notions she had grown up with were false, if they really meant something. I told her they would only mean what she wanted them to if she actively believed that they did. If she stopped questioning herself for once in her life and just learned to _breathe_. Accept what she felt, and relinquish her fear of the unknown.

For, what of this love if you have no idea what to do with it? If you were afraid of it? Worried what you would do if it consumed you wholly and turned you blind against whatever you thought was rational, what was safe. I had already known her to challenge adversary when she felt threatened, but there was a part of her that was so stifled, so suffocated that she felt conflicted in every way.

This talk of sacrifice. Lightning knew of it, but she didn't feel it. She loved Serah, yes, but everything she had done was born out of an ideal that this is what her sister wanted, not what she needed. She knew what she had to do, but did she feel like how she went about everything was the right way? You don't have all the answers, you don't know what you're supposed to do all the time, but give your heart the chance to feel what you feel as right. She was ruled by her logic, her thoughts. Sacrifice in her mind and sacrifice in her heart were two utterly different things.

She felt as though we had spoken enough for the night, or so she said to me, and I respected her request to end the conversation there. It didn't take her long before she grew pensive and retreated into her shell as she always did.

But, even if she was silent, it was enough to have her by my side. Barely pressed against each other, the tips of our fingers singed with fire and ready to ignite if they were to touch. Breathing, silence, the echo of a thousand words still left unspoken. Waiting for the chance to come out for another night. The two of us, lying in watch as the darkness faded from a sky moving forward into the dawn.


End file.
